Questioning Authority: a focus of narrative therapy
The two quotes below came up in my tumblr roll in close proximity. They seemed to me, with only a little stretching, to be addressing the same problem from different perspectives. I want to use them to illustrate something that we hold precious in narrative therapy.
“[One] can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one’s faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the legitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies. Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state – by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted – render oppression redundant, unnecessary. Of course people who think and behave this way encounter no oppression. That’s their reward for good, submissive behavior. As Rosa Luxemburg put this: ‘Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.’ They are left alone by institutions of power because they comport with the desired behavior of complacency and obedience without further compulsion.”
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Glenn Greenwald (via theamericanbear)
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“At the social-relational level, the ghetto has undergone a process of ‘de-civilizing’ in Elias’s sense of the term, caused not by economic ‘mismatches’, the excessive generosity of welfare, or the ‘culture of poverty’ and ‘anti-social’ impulses of its residents, but by the withdrawal of the state and the ensuing disintegration of public space and social relations in the urban core. This process is echoed, at the symbolic level, by the demonization of the black sub-proletariat via the trope of the ‘underclass’, a scholarly myth anchored by the loathsome imagery of the fearsome ‘gang banger’ and the dissolute ‘welfare mother’. Decivilizing and demonization form a structural-cum-discursive couplet in which each element reinforces the other and both serve in tandem to legitimize the state policy of urban abandonment and punitive containment responsible for the parlous state of the contemporary ghetto.”
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Loic Wacquant - Decivilizing and demonizing: the social symbolic remaking of the black ghetto and Elias in the dark ghetto (via thepovertyoftheory)
In narrative therapy, we believe it is important to cultivate a way of living in which we regularly search out and question those things we are taking for granted. We have to take things for granted to function (for example, I’m taking for granted that someone will read these words), but taking something for granted can also be a kind of submission, of not noticing the chains our culture puts on us. “Good people” can unthinkingly implicate each other in staying blind to assumptions that have the effect of decivilizing and demonizing other good people.
So, whether the people who come for help with life problems unquestioningly accept their institutions of authority as just and good or whether they are already questioning, we try to find non-confrontational ways of inviting them to question what they are not yet questioning, to examine their relationship with the stories about their place in society and the possibilities that exist for their lives. We are on the lookout for ways of interesting people in helping themselves by helping others, of linking lives through shared purposes.
We can all always see more possibilities for our lives when we manage to peek around the blinders that come from accepting what our local culture hands us, and we narrative therapists believe that it is our job to develop compassionate, collaborative ways of helping people notice the blinders and see beyond them.
